Apo tin akri tis polis

If you see one contemporary Greek film, make it this one. Giannaris shows great promise as a director - raw, yet sensitive, and original. The film looks at the lives of young immigrants boys from the former Soviet Union caught between the work-hard ethic of their parents and the seductiveness of the modern, consumer-driven world. These kids live on the edge and Giannaris's film has an appropriately edgy feeling. Young, these boys feel invincible even though they live on society's margins where the trappings of a designer lifestyle seem to have more value than a human life. 'From the Edge of the City' delves deep into the seamier underbelly of modern society but with a special sensitivity that does its filmmaker and its subjects credit.

Self-consciously hip Wasted-Youth genre piece, the usual downward spiral of sex, petty crime, and drugs, done much better, and less pretentiously, by innumerable American Black ghetto films, here set in and around Athens among a group of transplanted Pontic Kazakhstani teens. The lads hustle their bodies, flirt with but never openly embrace homosexuality, to pay for drugs, living from one score and wad of cash to the next. Of course, the film exacts retribution so that a bad end awaits all, either in the form of arrest, severe injury, or death.

The film succumbs to the pointlessness of its subject matter; there's nothing particularly profound, compelling, or even remotely sympathetic about its cast of bored, directionless, and none-too-bright loafers who do nothing but selfishly chase after money and pleasure, unscrupulously screwing each other over to fulfill the pettiest of desires. There are no big dreams, no big hearts, nothing much gained or lost.

The film tries to make up for lack of content with self-conscious flourishes of style, relying heavy-handedly on a trendy soundtrack of techno-house and dilute hip-hop, fast-forwarding the frame rate, fooling around with aperture settings, conducting mock interviews with the main protagonist for a pseudodocumentary effect, and even at one point resorting to a totally gratuitous quote from Goddard's Contempt.

It seems Europeans are now fashioning their version of a very old American genre, the lower-class-self-destruct-coming-of-age story. Except for the empty stylistic intrusions, there is hardly any difference between this movie and Erick Zonka's Le Petit Voleur (The Little Thief, '99). By an odd coincidence--talk about unoriginality--the wayward boys of both find their first criminal employment by baby-sitting a whore, both even going so far as to disastrously double-cross their pimp bosses.

Not that the Americans aren't busy recycling this same old trash: try Requiem for a Dream.

It seems a huge rift has opened up in film between mainstream morality, on the one hand, and underworld noirish voyeurism, on the other. One can either go see a squeaky-clean, soft-core, Cellophane-wrapped, light-hearted goodie like Charlie's Angels, or a dark, damaged, doomed (increasingly imported) perversion like this. Talk about specialized, fractionalized markets.

Part Greek, part American pop culture, part Russian, part Basketball Diaries, part Fassbinder, part pity the poor prostitute.

If it were not so incoherent (or is it deliberately so?) there is much to be admired here. This is a classy film in many ways, not the least of which is how it zeroes in on urban teen disorientation in the midst of contemporary Western affluence, combining a sharp contrast between rustic origins of an immigrant underclass and trendy cosmopolitan lifestyles. And the main characters are as compelling as those of a big budget film, in no way suggesting their non-professional origins. There is likewise an unrelenting effort to reflect the way these kids actually talk to each other and think.

But it bites off way too much in trying to include something for everyone in its audience. A little coke snorting here, a little skin there, some inchoate gayness along the way, some obvious symbolism, even a taking-a-girl-home-to-meet-the-folks number (that backfires predictably). The overall effect is close to that of a television documentary rather than a dramatic story line. Something may be lost by relying on English subtitles, but for anyone unfamiliar with Russian or Greek there is no option.

Worth a look.

The fact that the director selected mostly street kids for this film, as in _Salaam Bombay_, definitely gives it an edge. Regardless of the viewers' sexual orientation, who the prostitutes have sex with is irrelevant, as the core of the matter is why they get into and stay in prostitution, why they do drugs, and how the cycle perpetuates itself. The demise of the Soviet Union had some rather negative consequences, such as the impoverishment of former Soviet nations and the subsequent diaspora of many of their nationals. Such is the story of ethnic Greek Khazahkstani expatriates. The story is set in Athens, but it could just as well be set in London, New York, Chicago, you name it. The tale is universal. The movie is good.

What is a nation? According to Benedict Anderson it is a community socially constructed; an imagined community, indeed. In order to be Greeks or Russians one must first share these imaginary narratives that set apart one people from the other. Cohesiveness must come after everyone commits to this exercise of the imagination. What happens, however, with young men like Sasha and his group of friends? Raised in Russia and then transferred back to the land of their progenitors they feel neither Russians nor Greeks. They have been expelled out of any possible narrative of integration, and instead they are lingering on the edges of the city, on the marginal borders that preclude them from obtaining full status citizenship.

Unable to fit in, these youngsters cannot be a part of the symbolic order. Society has banned them and as a consequence they partake in illegal activities. Some of them are good at stealing, others at prostituting themselves. But then again, since being a hustler is the most profitable activity most of them try to gain the favor of other men.

Sasha is a boy struggling with his own identity. He is heterosexual and he falls in love with a common whore. However, the only way he can make money is by participating in the same activities his friends do. If identity is defined throughout adolescence, it's very revealing witnessing this group of kids coming to terms with what they do. They're 18 or 19 years old and some of them affirm that everything is alright as long as they assume the active role in homosexual intercourse. Others, more lucidly, realize that it doesn't matter who penetrates who, all that matters is that sex is taking place.

Nonetheless, the kids cannot let go of social conventions, after all, identity also depends greatly on how one pictures oneself. Our own images also depend on the gaze of the other. But since all of them are estranged from imaginary narratives since the very beginning, they find it difficult to find their place into the world. One can only wonder if at least one of them will be able to step aside of the vicious circle of poverty.